Design and Implementation of an Encryption Unit to Enhance Satellite Communication Security

Satellite projects consume very high resources in all of their phases (research, design, manufacturing, testing and launching), they also extend for significant amount of time, and hence satellites must be protected against intrusion and data perception. Over the past years, satellite security has been overlooked except for military satellites because satellite intrusions were inconceivable as they far away from earth, but recently commercial satellite manufacturers realized the importance of satellite security because satellite intrusion became not an impossible task. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of encryption unit to secure satellite communication system by ciphering tele-commands using advanced encryption algorithm (AES) with random key generation, Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm and Hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) digital signature algorithm.